Jacket design for this debut novel by Molly Prentiss. It was published by Simon & Schuster and Scout Press in assignment of Penguin UK Books. Unfortunately in the end this cover was rejected. The book came out in a hardcover and a pocket version.

The design aimed to capture the mozaique of the story, by making a collage of the city, the brooding artist and the longing gaze of the Statue of Liberty. Corresponding with the rawness of New York in the 80's. The addition of colour is to emphasize the art critic's synethesia and the turmoil of downtown NYC. The naive colouring brings forth a secondary theme in the book: children. By doing this the themes all come together in an image that is complex and lush, but still pretty gritty and comprehensible.

AN INTOXICATING AND TRANSCENDENT DEBUT NOVEL THAT FOLLOWS A CRITIC, AN ARTIST, AND A NEW-TO-THE-CITY YOUNG WOMAN AS THEY FIND THEIR WAY—AND ULTIMATELY COLLIDE—AMID THE EVER-EVOLVING NEW YORK CITY ART SCENE OF THE 1980S.

Welcome to SoHo at the onset of the eighties: a gritty, quickly gentrifying playground for artists and writers looking to make it in the big city. Among them: James Bennett, a synesthetic art critic for the New York Times whose unlikely condition enables him to describe art in profound, magical ways, and Raul Engales, an exiled Argentinian painter running from his past and the Dirty War that has enveloped his country. As the two men ascend in the downtown arts scene, dual tragedies strike, and each is faced with a loss that acutely affects his relationship to life and to art.

It is not until they are inadvertently brought together by Lucy Olliason—a small town beauty and Raul’s muse—and a young orphan boy sent mysteriously from Buenos Aires that James and Raul are able to rediscover some semblance of what they’ve lost.